


As Dark Things are Meant to be Loved

by Fizzpop_Stenea



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: All chicks no dicks, F/F, Just two goth gfs having a converstation at midnight, Mentions of alcohol, mentions of drug use, useless pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26920876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fizzpop_Stenea/pseuds/Fizzpop_Stenea
Summary: Not my favorite ship with Gloria, which might not seem true after you read this, but I defenantly think these two dated for awhile, broke up, and totally ruined each other for a good while.
Relationships: Mary | Marnie/Yuuri | Gloria
Kudos: 15





	As Dark Things are Meant to be Loved

“Are you happy?” Gloria asks, watching the smoke curl out of Marnie’s mouth from the corner of her eye.

It’s a quiet night, by Spikemuth’s typical standards. No parties with roaring music, none of Piers’ dulcet and dreary singing floating out of an alleyway somewhere. Gloria likes nights like this, where it’s quiet, just the sounds of her breathing and the droning hum of numerous neon signs down below their rooftop perch. No one expected anything of Gloria in this space, up on Spikemuth’s rooftops between the hours of one and five A.M., and that was why she liked it so much. She could sit there for hours, staring at the ground, or the whiskey bottle in her hands and there would be no consequences. There would only be quiet.  
  
“In honesty?” Marnie begins to answer, a different kind of distance in her eyes, one that’s taking her father away from Gloria than she’s ever been. “No—but, I _am_ curious…”

Marnie doesn’t say anything else, narrowing her icy green eyes at the far wall of the town, which was coated in an unyielding curtain of shadows. From where they’re sitting, either girl could reach up to touch the curving roof of the domed city; neither does so, but Gloria does notice the way Marnie’s cigarette smoke seems to pool above them. Gloria turns her head to regard her companion, intending to ask for clarification, but, she just can’t help but notice the way the dark seems to make Marnie glow. Maybe that had just been the half-empty whiskey bottle in her hand speaking, but Gloria was truly raptured by Marnie’s fragile beauty.

“Curious about what?” Gloria asks again, talking around the lip of the bottle in her mouth so she can take a large swig after she speaks, just to avoid the eye contact. Little does she know Marnie is looking away too, thinking.

The fuzzy and warm feeling in her stomach washes over her body anew with the swig of intoxicating fluid, and Gloria finds that not even whiskey can make Marnie look like anything less than a frigid angel. She’s absolutely drowning in that leather jacket of hers, but the way her legs are tucked up to her chest makes her look so cold. Morpeko—cute, but Gloria hated battling against the little bastard—was sleeping under her arm, and she had a lit cigarette hanging loosely between her fingers.

“I am not curious _about_ anything…” Marnie says quietly, mysteriously—Gloria and the whiskey both agree that her mystery is part of what makes her so fascinating. “But, I am curious in my sadness.. And I am curious in my joy as well, I am, everseeking—ever _feeling_ —and I am in awe of all the beautiful moments life has given us, and of all the difficult ones..”

So maybe she was neither human nor angel, since the way she spoke suggested that she was poetry incarnate. And Gloria usually found herself with no reason or need for poetry, but she would reread and memorize Marnie’s stanzas and verses until she knew no other words.

“But are you _happy_?” Gloria asks, curious of the feeling she herself had been chasing after for years now.

“No, I’m not happy,” Marnie replies with a small sigh. “I’m open, to whatever emotions my body will weather while it still can, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The buzzing from the still-lit neon signs never sounded so loud before. Or was it Gloria’s heartbeat ringing in her ears that made the quiet sound seem so loud?

“Are _you_ happy?” Marnie asks, Gloria almost doesn’t hear her.

The silence that follows is deeper, heavier than any she has experienced before. To Gloria the question seemed so foolish—the notion of ‘happiness’ so unattainable—that if Marnie had been anyone else she would’ve laughed, or turned up her nose. But Marnie was Marnie, and as it just so happened Gloria had yet to make any sort of rude comments or jokes around her. And as it just so happened, Gloria was trying the absolute best she knew how to impress Marnie in one way or another, even if none of her attempts had worked out so far.

Everyone had always been so afraid of Gloria and her brashness, she couldn’t stand to watch Marnie run away from her as well.

“Does it matter?” Gloria responds with a question of her own, not wanting her mind to dwell on her own feelings for too long. Marnie shouldn’t be bothered with worrying about someone like her anyways, or at least, that’s what Gloria thought.

“No, not really,” Marnie says, and anyone who doesn’t know her would mistake her bluntness for cruelty. “Not in the grand scheme of everything, but it… It matters to me.”

“Well than no,” Gloria chuckles, taking another sip of the throat-biting liquid. “I’m not happy, and whiskey is easier to swallow than the truth, so I think I’ll stick to the alcohol.”

Maybe she sounded a bit bitter. Maybe she was a bit bitter, not at Marnie or herself, or the world or Arceus or anything like that. She was just bitter that the only love she hadn’t screwed up, was also the only love she’d never get to have.

“And does that whiskey still make you happy?’

“No.” Gloria doesn’t need time to think about this answer, she knew it long ago.

“Do you know what will make you happy?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t need to think about that one either, because the answer is sitting right beside her with a cigarette in her mouth.

For a second Gloria thinks Marnie might chide her for not going after her own happiness, as Victor often did, but the pale girl only sighs. There is no chiding or scorn for not acting upon her desires. There is no pressure. Just like the night between the hours of one and five in the morning, Marnie expects nothing from her, and it is relieving. There’s never any pressure when she’s with Marnie, no pressure except the pressure Gloria puts on herself.

“This town sucks,” Marnie huffs, smoke rolling out of her mouth while she speaks. It's the same complaint she has about every day of her life, ‘ _Spikemuth sucks.’_ “You ever just.. Wanna get in a taxi.. And never look back..?”

“And just where would you go?” Gloria doesn’t say that she’d just as soon leave all of the Galar region behind—she’s heard people say Unova is lovely this time of year,

“Somewhere, anywhere—does the ‘where’ really matter?”

_Yes_ , Gloria thinks.

“No,” Gloria says.

_It especially matters if you run off someplace where I can’t follow you._

Marnie gets quiet again, she is quiet often. Gloria has never been particularly good at reading people, but Marnie and her steel-cool gaze escape her completely. She can tell well enough though, that this silence is far different than the homey quiet of them sitting together without speaking. The kind of silence that only ever fell after someone misspoke, where the long and tense note of nothing held out the embarrassment radiating off the poor soul.

The rush of whiskey sloshing around in the bottle stirred the air with sound for just a moment while Gloria took a drink. But the quiet came flooding back in right after, making what space there was between them thick with silence.

Gloria can’t stand the silence. All her awareness goes creeping back up into her brain, and from there it’s only a matter of time until unwanted thoughts come slinking in. So Gloria takes another sip of whiskey, and watches Marnie blow out her billowing cloud of smoke to add to the foggy wreath forming above them, and accepts the fact that some people are worth suffering the silence for.

“I had that dream again last night,” Marnie says at the exact moment where Gloria thinks she can’t take it anymore.

“Yea?” She doesn’t need to ask, Marnie has told her about this dream many times.

“Yea…”

Marnie said it the same way every time without fail;

“The one where I’m on the roof of the city, and I start _falling backwards_.”

“Yes, I know, why bring it up now?”

“I didn’t fight it this time.” That isn’t the same as always though. “I knew it was going to drag me down again, it always does, so… I just kind of… Leaned back, and,” She pauses to take a drag of her cigarette. “And I fell.”

Gloria tips her head back and she closes her eyes. For a moment, she’s falling, not literally of course, but she can feel the wind rushing through her hair, and the empty, weightless sensation of not having anything under her feet. Sometimes there’s nothing she wants more than to live in a perpetual state of falling—the constant rush paired with excitement and just a little fear. To live in the constant state of almost flying.

“’s just a dream,” Gloria slurs, turning her head to watch a Weavile leading its troop of Sneasel down the adjacent alley. Everything looked so much smaller from the rooftops. “You know they don’t really mean anything.”

“Nothing really means anything,” Marnie breathes, her words floating out on white wisps of ghosts; whether that’s from the cold or the smoke, Gloria couldn’t say. “We decide what we think it means, and the feelings that arise from those decisions give it meaning.”

Gloria was probably just drunk, she knew that she was drunk, but Marnie’s words seemed to stand out more in her head, pressing back her other thoughts with its echoes. She had no clue such thoughts ever troubled Marnie’s mind, she usually looked so collected and cool, if nothing else bothered her, why would she waste time worrying about the greater meaning of anything?

She supposed that, like most things, it didn’t really matter.

“Why are you still here?” Marnie asks as if she never said anything at all. “Shouldn’t you be heading home, to your warm little bed?”

“You know why I’m here,” She says without opening her eyes. “I can’t go home without stupid Victor… Your brother lets him get so high he can’t even see straight, nevermind calling himself a taxi.”

Marnie laughs, a sweet and melodic giggle. Gloria doesn’t find having to lead her brother back home quite as funny, but she certainly hoped to find the same humor in it some day.

“Can’t blame Victor for doing what he can to make himself happy, he’s only human.” And Gloria knows, that like always, Marnie was right.

“You say that like you aren’t human yourself.”

“Maybe I’m not, I couldn’t tell you, I wouldn’t really know.”

There is a spring-coiled tension in the heavy air all around them, and it’s nothing short of maddening. Gloria rakes a hand through her own hair hastily, trying to fight back the urge to spit out her feelings for Marnie like a bad aftertaste that won’t settle right. It’s like a pressure under the skin, unrequited love, threating to come tearing out of her at all angles when finally given the chance. Her head knows that Gloria is nothing short of terrible at keeping secrets, but her heart understands the danger of giving someone the power to destroy everything she thought she knew she was.

And it’s her soul that will decide in the end, as it always is, but her soul is as undecided as ever.

_I could love her,_ Gloria reasons silently. _I’ve never loved anybody before, but, when I look at her face she gives me those feelings… Those feelings that make me think I could do anything at all._

Marnie flicks the ash from her cigarette, her shiny, fuscia-painted nails caught Gloria’s attention for the better half of a second. Still, not even the dark and icy angel was enough to keep her out of her thoughts for long.

_I could love her… And in the process I could let her tear me open, put me back together, and then tear me apart again.. Leaving me with pieces I don’t know how to put back together._

“You wanna.. Get out of here with me?” Marnie asks.

_I could love her as dark things are meant to be loved._

“And go where?” Gloria responds with a question of her own.

_Gently, and softly, with light as dim as candles. I could love her as greedily as the shadows love the light, as deep-minded, and dark-shadowed, and dreary-hearted as she needs. I would love her as dark things are meant to be loved, I would love her far too much._

“Anywhere we want,” Marnie says, her gaze a million miles away.

_Yes, a thousand, billion times yes,_ Gloria’s mind beseeched, pleading with her fragile heart and undecided soul.

“I hear Unova is lovely this time of year,” She says instead, trying to slow her heart which is racing at the very idea of it.

“You would want to go that far away from everything you know?” Marnie asks. Gloria doesn’t tell her that she would go to Unova and farther—that she would go all the way to Kanto, as far as Sinnoh or Alola and further still—in fact, she doesn’t tell Marnie anything else at all.

The only thing Gloria does is watch the distant forms of Piers, Victor and Raihan slowly stumbling down the road. She and Piers had agreed to swap siblings at the gate when Gloria left him with Victor and took Marnie to go on one of their midnight walks—and Raihan was probably only there to smoke Piers’ weed and make fun of the singer’s unproclaimed feelings for Turrfield’s strawberry blond gym leader.

“Le’s go,” Gloria murmurs, pushing herself up to stand with the hand that isn’t clutched around the neck of a whiskey bottle. “The boys are headin’ to the meeting spot.”

Quietly she slips the shiny brown bottle into her bag, while making a mental note to return it to Sonia before her mum can catch her with it. She shrugs her bag onto her shoulders and tears across the roof towards the fire-escape they clambered up here on in the first place. Desperately, she tries not to stare, but as she begins her decent down the ladder, she can’t help but notice the way the moonlight catches a silvery blue on Marnie’s dark hair, and the way her pale skin seems to glitter like sunlight-struck snow.

 _I would love her, as she is meant to be loved,_ Gloria thinks, before pushing the thought out of her mind all together—she still had to get herself and Victor home after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe it's cause I'm useless, gay, and constantly pining, but I can't stop writing about the twins being useless, gay, and helplessly pining
> 
> And yes, Sonia is the wine-drunk aunt who let's Gloria bum booze off of her, and Victor, Raihan and Piers get high all the time because those two are bad influences, and the twins mum has n o idea


End file.
